Environmental Campus Birkenfeld

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The Environmental Campus Birkenfeld (UCB) is an external location of the Trier University of Applied Sciences with about 1800 students, 289 employees and 59 professors and is located about five kilometres south of the city of Birkenfeld in the upper Nahetal, in the district of Neubrücke of the municipality of Hoppstädte-Weiersbach.

In terms of organisation, the UCB is divided into two specialist areas: environmental management/environmental law and environmental planning/environmental technology. In the first mentioned subject area are the mainly economically and legally oriented courses of study, in the second mentioned the more technically oriented ones. The UCB hosts eight institutes and five centres of excellence (which work similarly to institutes), as well as other research projects and student initiatives. The campus area with eight dormitories makes it possible to live, learn and work together in one place. The environmental campus Birkenfeld is the only German university location to be supplied exclusively with renewable energy such as electricity and heating.

History

Military Hospital (1952–1994)
Close to the larger American location Baumholder, the 98th General Hospital in Neubrücke, today a district of the municipality of Hoppstädte-Weiersbach, was built. The 44-hectare hospital was opened in 1952 and had 1,000 beds as well as various medical wards, including surgery, dentistry, orthopaedics, radiology, rehabilitation and ophthalmology. From the 1970s until 1984, the hospital was closed for cost reasons, then it was kept for further use. The main building complex ran on both sides in a comb-like manner around a central aisle in the east-west direction, in the southern appendix there were utilities (casino, supermarket, cinema, church), in the northern, at least in recent years, a dental practice. In the eastern part were team quarters, west in the detached buildings a primary school and apartment blocks. South of the railway tracks there were warehouse/freight handling halls, which were used until the 1990s to close the hospital furniture. In 1994, the Americans finally gave up the hospital, until 1996 the buildings were empty. The extensive railway installations for Army hospital trains are removed today.

Environmental Campus Birkenfeld (since 1996)
The environmental campus Birkenfeld as an external location of Trier University of Applied Sciences was built on the initiative of the former district councillor of Birkenfeld district, Ernst Theilen, in 1996 on the site of the former US military hospital. The UCB became a showcase conversion project in Hunsrück, as a new site abandoned by the American armed forces could be used here. The site and buildings were renovated or rebuilt in the 1990s. Some American apartment blocks and a primary school were still in use until the end of 2009. The church on the site was built until the end of last year